Specifically, Marcus points out common mistakes he has been seeing website owners and SEOs make since Google rolled out their Hummingbird algorithm, and how to fix these mistakes.

Hear his advice in the video below:

Here are some key takeaways from the video:

One of the most common mistakes Marcus sees is people misunderstanding Hummingbird altogether. People believe it’s just a minor change, when really Google is taking a completely different approach to how they understand queries.

In the past, two queries with the same meaning that were typed out differently would product different results. Searchmetrics conducted a study showing the number of unique URLs in search results have gone down 6.5% since Hummingbird launched.

Google search has become less about producing a variety of results and more about producing the best results, which means that there is a lot more competition when it comes to producing content. If your content is too similar to what’s already out there, and doesn’t add any additional value, it may not get shown.

When it comes to producing content, people should think about how they can answer searchers’ questions in a way that completely fulfills their needs. Marcus says if your content is holistic it will get found for many terms.

Today creating content is about thinking of the typical questions a user has, and answer these questions with as much supporting information as you can provide to back up your answer.

Producing rich content means your website will naturally be filled with the keywords you want to rank for.

Marcus says the best optimized site in the world is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is always fresh, has great internal linking structure, and contains holistic content that provides complete answers to users’ questions.

Marcus says Wikipedia is a great site to learn from when it comes to producing content that pleases Google Hummingbird.

Murray Newlands

Murray is Deputy Editor at Search Engine Journal,Murray founded The Mail in 2013, an angel-funded startup publication covering performance marketing and mobile marketing. Murray is an advisor to a number of bay area startups including VigLink. In 2011 Wiley published his book Online Marketing: A User's Manual. Born in England, Murray moved to the USA in 2011 being recognized by the US government as "an alien of extraordinary ability". Murray co-authored Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals with Bruce Clay. Murray runs the agency Influence People bases in San Francisco.

Thanks for sharing such a informative interview. It is a great tutorial on Google Hummingbird update. It seems that whatever content we need to post on our blog it should be relevant to the user’s search queries. So before writing content we need to make a research study on our target market.

Great stuff. I was lucky that I decided to write longer article on my first website and hummingbird really liked that because it naturally answered topics. I’ve now gone even further with my new site and started with Hummingbird in mind when writing articles about what men want to read. Instead of just using keywords like “best grilled steak recipe”, I start with that for the url/title/subheading optimization and then make sure I fill in relevant contextual clues such as “medium well”, “dry rub”, and “delicious” in those same areas as well as throughout the article. I’ve even started going back through my first site to re-write older articles this way.